Apple is worth $1 trillion

At about 11:48 a.m. ET, Apple (AAPL) became the first U.S.-listed company to be worth $1,000,000,000,000.00.

The price of a single share of Apple crossed $207.0425. Multiply that by 4,829,926,000 shares outstanding and you get a trillion bucks.

Some might argue that $1 trillion is just a random round number. But whether it’s a trillion or $999 billion, the point is that Apple is an incredibly massive company, with an incredible reach, and with an incredible amount of profits (In 2017, Apple earned $48 billion on $229 billion in sales).

“The fact that you have a billion and a half people with Apple devices around the world in a sense gives them a user base that if they can figure out other ways to make money off that user base,” NYU professor Aswath Damodaran said on CNBC. “I think you could get a bonus on that growth rate.”

Is it really worth it?

Apple’s prospects at this juncture are critical since stock prices are theoretically just the present value of all of a company’s future cash flows.

“[I]t’s still trading about 17 times next year’s earnings estimates,” said Damodaran, who is also known as the Dean of Valuation. “I mean, compare that to some of the other FAANG names— Alphabet 53 times, Amazon 162 times.”

The Apple logo is pictured inside the newly opened Omotesando Apple store at a shopping district in Tokyo June 26, 2014. REUTERS/Yuya Shino

History is riddled with companies that saw outsized valuations on speculation that these businesses were the next big thing. During the dotcom bubble, companies with no profits but lots of prospects regularly saw billion-dollar valuations.

But Apple is different because it’s actually earning a ton of money.

“You don’t need a +20x price earnings multiple to get to $1 trillion valuation,” Datatrek Research’s Jessica Rabe said in an email on Thursday. “It would be logical, but wrong, to think a huge valuation must stem from a sky-high PE ratio. Apple trades for 17.3 times next year’s consensus estimate, even before you exclude cash. That’s barely above the market multiple of 16.7 times.”

You have to give credit to Tim Cook

In August 2011, Cook had the daunting task of taking over the CEO role for visionary Steve Jobs in August 2011. (Jobs died two months later.)

“On the one hand, yes, Cook was teed up for success by a genius, once-in-lifetime CEO,” Yahoo Finance editor-in-chief Andy wrote in January. “On the other hand, Cook had huge shoes to fill, and more to the point, has not rolled out any revolutionary new products a la Steve. Naysayers said that unless he did that Apple’s stock would falter. To the contrary, it has thrived. Why? In large part because the iPhone’s growth has mitigated that need.”

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, takes a selfie with a customer and her iPhone as he visits the Apple Store in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., March 27, 2018. REUTERS/John Gress

Though, Cook has not been shy about criticizing the administration either. In the company’s quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, he went directly after Trump’s use of tariffs in his tit-for-tat trade war.

“Our view on tariffs is that they show up as a tax on the consumer and end up resulting in lower economic growth,” Cook said. “And sometimes can bring about significant risk of unintended consequences.”

Trump never reacted to that comment, though we don’t know if Trump heard it either.

“Apple is an American company that assembles its products in China,” Datatrek’s Rabe said. “It is so successful in each country that it has avoided the fate of many American transnational companies: being a piñata in the global trade/tariff debate. While this political hedge was clearly an accident of history, it works well today.”

(David Foster, Oath)

–Sam Ro is managing editor at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter: @bySamRo